Eclipse Phase

Eclipse Phase is a science fiction pen and paper roleplaying game from Posthuman Studios. The setting is a post-apocalyptictranshumanist grab bag of most of the weird and cool ideas from sci-fi in the last forty years. To give a brief overview of the setting, ten years prior to when ever this occurs a conflict on the scale of World War III began and quickly escalated into a near extinction event when rogue self-improving artificial intelligences called the T.I.T.A.Ns decided to go Skynet on transhumanity. Earth was rendered completely uninhabitable as factories churned out death machines and nano-swarms shredded flesh and stone alike. As the death toll climbed into the billions desperate people began beaming copies of their minds out to the rest of the solar system which was fairing only slightly better. Then, when all seemed lost, the T.I.T.A.Ns vanished leaving a stunned four hundred fifty million people to begin rebuilding.

One might think that the event that came to be known as the Fall might bring transhumanity together. It didn't. If anything the solar system is more divided than ever before as different factions and ideologies vie for control of the future. This is where the sheer volume of world building really shows up. This would just be so much fluff except that the very first part of character creation is selecting origins and sociopolitical faction. These carry in game bonus and penalties that do a lot to define how the character behaves and what options will be available to them. So what do you want to play as? You can be a hypercorpexecutive working to keep the inner system under the control of the all mighty credit or an Anarchist cracking DRMs and working to bring your rep score to new levels. Maybe you want to play a chimpanzee uplift seeking recognition as a full person or a second generation martian settler working tirelessly to terraform the red plant. Really the sky is not even the limit with the options provided. Extropiananarcho-capitalist, techno-progressiveTitanian, infolifeexhuman, you can even be an unmodified normal human from the JovianRepublic. Eclipse Phase has it all.

The uniting thread for all of these groups is Firewall, a secret, decentralized network of folks from across the solar system working together to ensure the continued existence of the human race against existential threats. The T.I.T.A.Ns may be gone but they left plenty of nasty surprises and that's assuming they were actually the worst threat we'll face. Five years after the Fall we began to discover stargate type devices leading to distant planets. Turns out the Milky Way is teeming with ancient alien civilizations. Extinctones.